Jonathan Saunders / Spring 2014 RTW

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“It’s free-spirited, more casual I suppose—the way my friends want to dress.” Jonathan Saunders didn’t need to offer any more of an intellectual justification for the collection he’d just shown at Tate Britain—designers don’t, when their audience just gets it. After ten years in fashion, Saunders has settled down with the women he dresses—hip yummy mummies; the thirty-to-fifty-somethings who check his collection out for pieces to perk up the daily grind, and the occasional not-too-done-up evening thing to show off a still-hot body. In his tenth-anniversary collection, he took them with him to a place beyond his fail-safe printed knee-length shifts and tight-waisted dirndl dresses. Those were very nice, too, but honestly, heading towards a bit of a rut. A fashion-conscious, sensible woman sees the danger of ruts. She’s probably of an age when the nineties were her first fashion heyday, and now that there’s all this talk about the “return” of the decade, she could fancy recapturing a bit of it. On the other hand, there’s no going back in a wise woman’s wardrobe. A limp literal slip is her daughter’s bill—not hers. So: What she needs is someone on her wavelength to demonstrate how loosening up can look new and polished.

Jonathan Saunders is that man. His collection breaks down into a huge range of coordinates, from satin flower embroidered bombers and fluid sweatpants, to knee-length baggy shorts (which will be ubiquitous next summer), to high-waisted short suede skirts, semi-sheer flower-embroidered shirts, printed cardigans, and many options in dresses. He brings with it the slightly peculiar, strangely compelling color sense which sets his pieces apart and makes other women view a Saunders wearer with a slight pang of envy: odd combinations and degraded treatments of ice blue, ochre, beige, orange, ballet-slipper pink, burgundy. Details also draw the eye in: cheongsam-like side-slits in skirts, trimmed with rouleaux bows; the fine multistrap necklines of dresses which upgrade them from being generic slips. It was a well-thought-out, pragmatic yet sophisticated move on for Jonathan Saunders, and a collection dense with pieces that can be pulled out and worn whichever way by many kinds of women.